Nowadays, storage technologies are rapidly developing, and various new storage technologies come up one after another incessantly. For example, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is a new generation of SCSI technology. Like the currently popular Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk, both SAS and SATA adopt serial technology to achieve higher transmission rate and improve internal space by shortening the connection cables. SAS is a new interface developed after the parallel SCSI interface. This interface is designed for improving the performance, availability, and scalability of storage systems and providing compatibility with SATA hard disks.
The SAS expander can be viewed as a switch with SAS interface and can be used in order to expand the capacity in the system of the SAS storage system. More than a dozen of SAS array cards can be linked by the expander, and even hundreds of hard disks can be connected after cascading up expanders.
Each expander chip needs to be configured through a configuration file. As the number of expanders increases, the current situation is that even configurations of expander chips are similar and most configuration contents are similar, however, it is still necessary to store each configuration file corresponding to each expander chip in advance, so that the flash memory in the storage system is out of space. Additionally, each expander chip is required to modify or update different configuration files to the specified area when the expander chips are burned or updated, and there is a risk of error updating or error modification.